5 ms·

I agree with many of your points, but the comical levels of unadulterated doomerism make it hard to take very seriously. The world isn’t over because a company

I agree with many of your points, but the comical levels of unadulterated doomerism make it hard to take very seriously. The world isn’t over because a company decided some unnecessary backend employees didn’t need to work there anymore. Standards of living have never been higher, worldwide poverty has never been lower, all hand-delivered to each of us via capitalism.

sam8401 3y ago
Agree
ath3nd 3y ago
Capitalism is like a sleight of hand trick, a cheap con designed to distract with stupid toys and distractions while it robs you blind. It pretending that it's creating value, while never showing where the value comes from. Often it comes from extraction from other places. What the OP is experiencing is merely one of the many ugly heads of the very much real process of extracting value in pursuit of profit. There are many other sides: - Your cheap t-shirts are often created with child labor, and at tremendous cost to the environment. - Their cigarettes and pain relievers are your addiction and your death. - Your meat-for-everybody-everyday comes at the expenses of destruction of native habitat, immense animal suffering, toxic runoff and deforestation. - Your consumer electronics come at the cost of toxic levels of PFAs in your and your children's blood. - Your convenient transport comes at expense of choking cities, rising sea levels, and dying habitats. - Your ChatGPT/Dall-E convenience robs hundreds if not thousands of people from their livelihood, and has been trained of others' work without their permission or consent, and the electricity and pollution bill will astound you. - Coca cola and their plastic producing friends and its convenient packaging created an obesity epidemic and an island of garbage in the pacific. - Teflon and 3M and their amazing, revolutionary non-stick surfaces created our future cancers. What's happening with the layoffs in the industry is just another facet of extracting $$$ without looking where the "extraction" comes from, yet another logical level of "optimizing", disguising the fact that it's all a race to the bottom. Yet another group is going to be replaced by automation or less workers doing more work for less pay, simply in pursuit of "value". > Standards of living have never been higher, worldwide poverty has never been lower, all hand-delivered to each of us via capitalism. Yes, it's the excess before the imminent end, it's the idea you can infinitely grow in a finite world with finite resources. This idea is mirrored by the corps and their gambles on the stock market, pretending to create a value in the millions more than they actually do create. It's unhinged, unstoppable, unsupported by reality, grotesque growth, very much like cancer. You can disagree, protest and twist and shake your logic like an eel trying to deny the undeniable: the only thing capitalism is hand-delivering is the collapse of society, the mass extinction of nature, and the end of a livable Earth. The fact that the OP, a more than talanted dev, can't find a job easily atm is very much connected to the extraction of value, and the insidious exploitative character of capitalism. Take your growth and keep it to yourself.
- StreetChief 3y ago
  The fact someone so skilled can't find work sets off so many alarm bells for me.
- fulladder 3y ago
  It sounds like you've been out of work for a year and you've fallen into a state of anger and despair. It's understandable and you're hardly the first person that has happened to, but I'd really encourage you to rethink how you're looking at life. Just in a practical sense, even if you can 90% hide your rage in a work setting, the other 10% is still going to be enough to discourage anyone from hiring you. People are just going to be scared to work with you and hiring managers won't want to take the chance. Just my two cents, friend.
  - iExploder 3y ago
    it sounds like you are projecting your own insecurities my friend. how about you try to dismantle ath3nd's take with counter argument instead of going for ad hominem attack.
    - fulladder 3y ago
      It actually was not meant to be an attack, although perhaps you are right that I am projecting my own insecurities in some way. If you care to say more about why you saw my message that way, you might help me with your feedback. My honest motivation for writing the message was that I understood (maybe misunderstood) ath3nd to be saying that they had lost a job one year ago, and then I saw a very long list of political grievances. It matched a pattern I have observed in my career where a person on the team seems to have very strident political opinions, but when you talk to that person it becomes clear that the person is angry about something in their own life and is using political discourse as a way of being angry all the time without acknowledging to themselves the issue in their own lives. I put these two things together and thought perhaps I could help a fellow engineer who may have fallen into a pit of despair. Based on ath3nd's response, it doesn't sound like that's their situation. Maybe my comment helped another person who was reading the thread. Maybe it helped no one. I'll never know. I'm not going to going to offer counterarguments because it was never my intention to engage ath3nd on any political matters. I don't necessarily even disagree with the person, but I also don't think HN is at its best when people use it for political debates. My comment was posted with a good heart on the theory that it might or might not help someone else. That does not preclude the possibility that my comment reflects my own insecurities or failings. I think almost anything you do or say is in some way a reflection of who you are, and like anyone else I surely do have various insecurities and flaws.

sam8401 3y ago

Agree

ath3nd 3y ago

Capitalism is like a sleight of hand trick, a cheap con designed to distract with stupid toys and distractions while it robs you blind. It pretending that it's creating value, while never showing where the value comes from. Often it comes from extraction from other places. What the OP is experiencing is merely one of the many ugly heads of the very much real process of extracting value in pursuit of profit. There are many other sides: - Your cheap t-shirts are often created with child labor, and at tremendous cost to the environment. - Their cigarettes and pain relievers are your addiction and your death. - Your meat-for-everybody-everyday comes at the expenses of destruction of native habitat, immense animal suffering, toxic runoff and deforestation. - Your consumer electronics come at the cost of toxic levels of PFAs in your and your children's blood. - Your convenient transport comes at expense of choking cities, rising sea levels, and dying habitats. - Your ChatGPT/Dall-E convenience robs hundreds if not thousands of people from their livelihood, and has been trained of others' work without their permission or consent, and the electricity and pollution bill will astound you. - Coca cola and their plastic producing friends and its convenient packaging created an obesity epidemic and an island of garbage in the pacific. - Teflon and 3M and their amazing, revolutionary non-stick surfaces created our future cancers. What's happening with the layoffs in the industry is just another facet of extracting $$$ without looking where the "extraction" comes from, yet another logical level of "optimizing", disguising the fact that it's all a race to the bottom. Yet another group is going to be replaced by automation or less workers doing more work for less pay, simply in pursuit of "value". > Standards of living have never been higher, worldwide poverty has never been lower, all hand-delivered to each of us via capitalism. Yes, it's the excess before the imminent end, it's the idea you can infinitely grow in a finite world with finite resources. This idea is mirrored by the corps and their gambles on the stock market, pretending to create a value in the millions more than they actually do create. It's unhinged, unstoppable, unsupported by reality, grotesque growth, very much like cancer. You can disagree, protest and twist and shake your logic like an eel trying to deny the undeniable: the only thing capitalism is hand-delivering is the collapse of society, the mass extinction of nature, and the end of a livable Earth. The fact that the OP, a more than talanted dev, can't find a job easily atm is very much connected to the extraction of value, and the insidious exploitative character of capitalism. Take your growth and keep it to yourself.

StreetChief 3y ago
The fact someone so skilled can't find work sets off so many alarm bells for me.
fulladder 3y ago
It sounds like you've been out of work for a year and you've fallen into a state of anger and despair. It's understandable and you're hardly the first person that has happened to, but I'd really encourage you to rethink how you're looking at life. Just in a practical sense, even if you can 90% hide your rage in a work setting, the other 10% is still going to be enough to discourage anyone from hiring you. People are just going to be scared to work with you and hiring managers won't want to take the chance. Just my two cents, friend.
- iExploder 3y ago
  it sounds like you are projecting your own insecurities my friend. how about you try to dismantle ath3nd's take with counter argument instead of going for ad hominem attack.
  - fulladder 3y ago
    It actually was not meant to be an attack, although perhaps you are right that I am projecting my own insecurities in some way. If you care to say more about why you saw my message that way, you might help me with your feedback. My honest motivation for writing the message was that I understood (maybe misunderstood) ath3nd to be saying that they had lost a job one year ago, and then I saw a very long list of political grievances. It matched a pattern I have observed in my career where a person on the team seems to have very strident political opinions, but when you talk to that person it becomes clear that the person is angry about something in their own life and is using political discourse as a way of being angry all the time without acknowledging to themselves the issue in their own lives. I put these two things together and thought perhaps I could help a fellow engineer who may have fallen into a pit of despair. Based on ath3nd's response, it doesn't sound like that's their situation. Maybe my comment helped another person who was reading the thread. Maybe it helped no one. I'll never know. I'm not going to going to offer counterarguments because it was never my intention to engage ath3nd on any political matters. I don't necessarily even disagree with the person, but I also don't think HN is at its best when people use it for political debates. My comment was posted with a good heart on the theory that it might or might not help someone else. That does not preclude the possibility that my comment reflects my own insecurities or failings. I think almost anything you do or say is in some way a reflection of who you are, and like anyone else I surely do have various insecurities and flaws.